blah

most of today was spent grading... boring and didn't let me get to my own math. my students told lots of lies on their quizzes too. i went over problems nearly identical to the quiz beforehand, and enough got 9s or 10s (out of 10) that i think it was fair. but the ones lower than that weren't 7s and 8s, they were like 3s, 4s, and 5s. really, everyone's happier when people do their homework right... it's happier for the students, and it's easier for me to grade... oi.

after grading, i sat down and went through data i'm having the computer generate for me
for my work with dr. z.... a conjecture i had doesn't seem to be true anymore, but maybe a modified version is. then again i need to convince myself that one other pattern i found in the data isn't a contradiction to the 40 year old paper i'm studying too.

we'll see.

it's going to be an interesting week

* my students have their first exam on friday. that means no quiz to grade this week or homework to check, but it probably means more people to explain things to in office hours, etc. and it means instead of 1 hour of office hours on thursday, i'll be glued to my office for more like 5-6 hours... oi.

* i'm frustrated with the data i mentioned above not matching my original conjecture.. i have a similar gap to fill on another project for dr. z. i hope i can go in monday with more than "so i have lots of apparent contradictions for you and no explanation"... that would be no good.

* diane was already asking me yesterday "when are you going to give a seminar on the paper i gave you?"... i already spent a couple hours to get through page 1 with lots of books to help last night and it's a 15 page paper... she might not get an answer she likes next week.

* i go to valpo next weekend... i'll have to bring lots of grading (i.e. exams) with me most likely, which is fine... but it also cuts out 3 days (sat, sun, mon AM) out of my computer time to be productive for dr. z. basically i'll get a ride straight from the airport to my meeting with him when i get back from valpo, so what's done on friday is what he sees next monday. that distressed me last weekend when i was gone to pitt, but i had monday morning to tie things together nicely. this time i don't have that luxury.

* i, like most of my friends my year here, am extremely frustrated with how much there is to do and how little time i have to study for orals which are somehow supposed to be the focus of this semester. i work 90% of the time i'm awake on math and still never seem to get quite far enough down my to do list. this makes me extremely frustrated and sad.

done e-venting...

tangent: i finally watched apprentice from this past thursday while i was grading today. i was hoping markus would be fired going into the first boardroom, but chris's decision to only bring markus in was his death sentence before any of the rest of his team had left the room. one would think that these people have seen previous episodes of the show and learned from them, but apparently not... this was sooo parallel to bradford giving up his immunity on week 2 of season 2 that it was perfectly obvious what the result would be. oi... stupid people...

now, that's really it...time for sleep.

night y'all.